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On behalf of the majority of Australians, I demand a halt on immigration. For many, many years, the Australian people have been telling us to lower immigration. To keep the numbers low. To put the interests of Australians living here before the interests of foreigners who don’t. Since the election of the Albanese Labor government, these calls have grown louder and stronger. They’re being heard in the newspaper columns of economic commentators and housing experts. They’re being heard in the growing lines of people waiting to inspect a single property in the hope of securing a rental. They’re being heard around family dinner tables as Australians struggle to find the money for huge rent hikes amid our cost of living crisis. They’re being heard in the daily traffic jams as record numbers of immigrants flood our cities and increase congestion. They’re being heard in the growing cities of tents and swags and cars popping up around Australia as more and more people fall into homelessness and despair. And the Albanese government is deaf to all of them. In January this year there were 125,000 new arrivals. That’s more than the entire population of Ballarat, and almost as much as Darwin’s, in a single month. Since the election, the number of new arrivals has reached more than a million. Australia is experiencing the biggest two-year population surge in the country’s history. There are now 27 million people in Australia. It’s a staggering number. In September 2003, the Bureau of Statistics published a projection for Australia which said our population would reach a figure between 23 million and 31 million people by the year 2051. With our current immigration levels, Australia is on track to have more than 31 million people before 2035 – 16 years earlier than the ABS projected. And this has happened despite the majority of Australians being firmly against it. The majority of Australians do not want a ‘big Australia’. This is confirmed every time Australians are polled on the issue. Let’s have a look at those numbers: · Newspoll 2018:56% of Australians wanted lower immigration · Essential poll 2018: 64% of Australians believed immigration was too high · Australian National University poll 2019: 70% of Australians did not support further population growth · Resolve Strategic survey 2021: 58% of Australians thought immigration should be lower than pre-pandemic levels · Australian Population Research Institute survey October 2021: 69% of Australians didn’t support more population growth · Australian Population Research Institute survey February 2023: 70% of Australians wanted lower levels of immigration · Essential poll May 2023: 60% of Australians supported capping immigration until we had sufficient affordable housing · Resolve Strategic survey July 2023: 59% of Australians said the current level of immigration intake was too high · ABC’s QandA program August 2023: 65% of Australians wanted immigration cut to relieve pressure on housing · Resolve Strategic poll December 2023: 62% of Australians said immigration was too high and 74% thought immigration under the Albanese Labor government was “unplanned and unmanaged”, and… · Freshwater poll for the Australian Financial Review in December 2023: 61% of Australians said immigration was too high Labor isn’t listening. The Coalition didn’t listen either. One Nation has always championed lower immigration in solidarity with the Australian people. I’ve been saying it since I first came here. Here’s what I said in my maiden speech as the Member for Oxley: “Immigration must be halted in the short term so that our dole queues are not added to by, in many cases, unskilled migrants not fluent in the English language.” I also warned we were in danger of being swamped by immigration from Asia. I was called a racist, of course, by the major parties and big media who are in lockstep on a big Australia. But today, seven out of the top 10 source countries for immigration to Australia are in Asia – including four out of the top five – and the numbers are out of control. I was right, of course. Here’s what I said in my first speech in the Senate in 2016: Australians have never been permitted to vote on immigration and multiculturalism. When have we been asked or consulted about our population? We reached a population of 24 million this year, 17 years ahead of prediction. Governments have continually brought in high levels of immigration, so they say, to stimulate the economy. This is rubbish. The economy is stimulated by funding infrastructure projects, creating employment. What major projects have we had in this country for the past 30 years? How many dams have we built in the past 50 years? The only stimulation that is happening is welfare handouts—many going to migrants unable to get jobs. At present, our immigration intake is 190,000 a year. High immigration is only beneficial to multinationals, banks and big business, seeking a larger market while everyday Australians suffer from this massive intake. They are waiting longer for their life-saving operation. The unemployment queues grow longer—and even longer when government jobs are given priority to migrants. Our city roads have become parking lots. Schools are bursting at the seams. Our aged and sick are left behind to fend for themselves. And many cities and towns struggle to provide water for an ever-growing population. Our service providers struggle to cope, due to a lack of government funding, leaving it to charities to pick up the pieces. Governments, both state and federal, have a duty of care to the Australian people. Clean up your own backyard before flooding our country with more people who are going to be a drain on our society. I call for a halt to further immigration and for government to first look after our aged, the sick and the helpless. Most Australians don’t want high immigration, and the major parties completely ignore the polls that universally confirm this fact. However there’s one type of poll they can’t ignore: a national plebiscite. This mechanism for asking every voter their opinion has been available to Australian government since Federation but has only been used three times in 123 years. It was used twice during the First World War by our seventh Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, to ask Australians their opinion about military conscription. Both plebiscites saw Australians reject conscription – most notably the Diggers themselves who went to the polling booths set up behind the trenches on the Western Front. The results prompted the first historic split of the Australian Labor Party, when Hughes took some senior members with him to join the old Commonwealth Liberal Party in 1917. Labor didn’t win government again until 1929. The only other plebiscite was held in the 1970s, when Australians chose ‘Advance Australia Fair’ as our nationl anthem. I think it’s time to have another one. I think it’s past time to ask every Australian voter what they think is an appropriate level of immigration. This will give the major parties an opportunity to make their case why they’ve completely ignored the will of the Australian people. The major parties will be able to explain they keep immigration levels to please their corporate masters. They’ll be able to come clean on the fact they use high immigration to paper over the widening cracks in the Australian economy to burnish their terrible economic credentials. National productivity has fallen more than 7% since the election of Labor, and we are now in a per-capita recession. Interest rates have soared, driving thousands of Australian families into mortgage stress. High immigration has been a disaster for Australia. We must catch up on our housing, our infrastructure and our services. We must care first for the Australians living here now. We must put our people and our nation first. That is One Nation’s priority. It’s always been our priority. That’s because we listen to the Australian people when the major parties don’t. We respect the Australian people and their wisdom. It’s past time the rest of parliament did the same.